The applause that had filled the stage slowly died down.
But the audience could hardly bring themselves to leave. Only after the ushers gently encouraged them toward the exits did people begin moving, their faces full of lingering regret.
“I’ve never heard a Pathétique like that before. It felt like I’d gone back to my youth.”
“Hahaha! That ticklish feeling in one corner of my chest was a masterpiece.”
The people pouring out into the plaza before the fountain replayed the performance they had just seen, their faces flushed. As daisies shone brightly on the traffic display board, the night in New York was dyed with the musical afterglow they had left behind.
The next day, news of the concert was released through the New York Philharmonic’s official channel and the daily papers.
The performance clips they uploaded became a hot topic the moment they went online. The response was especially strong to the four-hands piece by Seoha and Gyeoul.
[Official] New York Philharmonic - “The Theme of Duckie” (World Premiere)
Views: 2.1 million
└I was there in person. In twenty years of listening to classical music, I’ve never had a moment that gave me chills like that. The entire audience in Geffen Hall practically stopped breathing.
It was like listening to the confession of a lonely mathematician. Through the music, I realized that even the life of a genius is not so easy. I found deep comfort in it.
└The retrograde inversion in the second movement was incredible. The way it completely reversed the despair of the first movement and sublimated it was truly moving.
└When I left after the concert, people were debating in the plaza. I got curious and joined in, and they were all strangers lol. Everyone was just too reluctant to go home.
└It was a night that showed modern classical music can surpass the works of the old masters.
[Official] New York Philharmonic - “Beethoven Virus,” 4-Hands (Han Gyeoul & Yu Seoha)
Views: 4.08 million.
└So this was improvised?
└I’m a piano major at a music college, and I think I’ll just die lolololol. The way they match each other as an ensemble makes no sense.
└Pure talent itself.
└Ah, seriously, it’s so good. I’ve been watching it on repeat for hours now. It’s like a scene from a movie. Their expressions are so great, too.
└I’m the taxi driver who drove that kid yesterday. His face had gone pale because he was late for the performance, and he turned out to be the architect of Oracle. I’ll remember it as the greatest honor of my life.
└It looked like young geniuses happily playing around on the piano, and I found myself smiling.
└You can hear the audience gasp in the middle when he gets up and crosses arms with Gyeoul lololol.
└Those two have been playing around like that since their gifted high school days. They probably innocently thought no one knew, but everyone just pretended not to notice.
After spending the night at the hotel provided by the New York Philharmonic, Seoha left for Boston the next day. Leaning his head against the bus window, Seoha watched the scenery pass by.
The piece Gyeoul had played flowed through his earphones. It was a raw live clip, complete with the applause and cheers of thousands. Seoha read the comments, then quietly closed his eyes.
‘I never even thought it would reach anyone.’
It was not a piece he had created for someone else to hear. It was the despair he had been unable to speak of to anyone, the wretched confession of himself collapsing day after day before an unsolved problem.
The terrible solitude and suffocation he had poured into it while pressing down hard with his pencil in his cramped dorm room, those heavy, sticky masses of emotion, had been scattered through the heart of New York by Gyeoul’s hands.
“Why?”
People were enthusiastic about the piece. They said they had hurt with it and found comfort in it. Seoha realized that all of them, too, were living while carrying their own loneliness and pain.
“Phew...”
He let out a long breath.
Strangely, his heart felt much lighter, as if the lump blocking his chest had been washed away. The mental fatigue that had built up over several months had burned away cleanly in just a few minutes of performance yesterday.
The compulsion to find an answer, the sense of responsibility to live up to expectations. After pouring all of it into a furnace called music, new formulas began to flow through his emptied mind.
‘You’re the same too, aren’t you?’
A familiar landscape appeared outside the window. It was time to face the monster again.
But he did not feel solemn as he had before. Only a pleasant thrill tickled his heart. Seoha opened his bag and took out a notebook.
“It won’t be easy, will it? How many notebooks will I have to fill before you show me the answer?”
Looking at the Charles River flowing proudly outside the window, he whispered softly, as if in anticipation.
***
A small pub in an alley in Sillim-dong.
Jingle.
Jihoon looked around, then approached the corner with a bright smile.
“Hyungs, Jiye noona! It’s been so long.”
The IMO comrades had gathered for the first time in a while.
Jiye, who now looked quite grown-up, saw the handsome Jihoon and beckoned him over. Changseok was still stubbornly sticking to his old nerdy style. Perhaps studying was taking its toll, because Dokyeong looked tired.
“Oh, Seong Jihoon! You’re old enough to wear a department jacket now?”
“I’m a sophomore, you know?”
When Changseok shook out his messy hair and acted familiar, Jihoon waved his hands in embarrassment and sat down.
“You must be popular, right? A face like yours is really rare at Seoul National University.”
“Are you male-crazy? Stop drooling. You still haven’t come to your senses.”
At Dokyeong’s scolding, Jiye raised her fist.
“Shut up. I’m Seo Jiye, the goddess of the chemistry department! If I set my mind to it, I could line up guys who like me for a hundred meters.”
“Then pick one of them! Why are you still forever alone?”
“Because they’re all losers! I miss the days when I could feast my eyes on Seoha and Jihoon.”
Changseok took off his glasses and wiped them as if exhausted.
“Stop it. It’s embarrassing in front of the kid.”
“Ahem!”
“But you’re not majoring in math either?”
At Dokyeong’s question, Jihoon smiled bitterly.
“How could I? Not after seeing someone like Seoha.”
As if they had agreed in advance, the three nodded at the same time.
“Right, right! Sujeong is the stubborn one!”
“I’m glad I went to the IMO back then. It was nice to realize early that I was an extremely ordinary human being.”
“She’s overshadowed by Seoha, but Sujeong is no joke either. There are things you can never understand unless you experience them directly.”
Jiye was studying chemistry, while Dokyeong, Changseok, and Jihoon were all studying engineering.
“Did you see the compression theory Apex Lab announced this time? Our department is in a state of emergency because of it.”
Dokyeong responded to Jihoon’s words.
“Of course I saw it. How does Seoha manage to make us study even from there? The assignment my professor gave us this semester is minimum energy theory. If I have to study ST Compression on top of that, my head’s going to split open.”
In undergraduate courses, they had only barely touched on the outline, but even that was enough to make the students feel like they were losing their minds.
“I saw the paper, and it was insane. I heard it came out during the process of designing Oracle. Since it’s practically already been proven in practice, the professors must have a lot to think about.”
Changseok nodded.
As someone majoring in computer science, Seoha’s theory made him feel awe beyond wonder—almost fear.
“I’m in chemistry, so I don’t have to do stuff like that!”
“......”
“......”
The three glared at Jiye, then sighed.
“Honestly, doesn’t it make you proud? The kids who used to eat tteokbokki with us at night are turning the global academic world upside down. When I say I know Seoha, everyone looks like they’re about to die of envy.”
Their friends were walking the path of pure mathematics that they had given up on.
Looking at Seoha and Sujeong, Changseok felt complicated. Pride, and at the same time, a strange sense of deprivation. But now, he sincerely cheered them on.
“There’s a bad side to that, too.”
Dokyeong furrowed his brow and tossed out a remark.
Everyone’s eyes turned to him at the unexpected comment.
“What is?”
“Knowing Seoha?”
He shook his head as if fed up.
“Yeah. Someone keeps bothering me by email. He asked me about Seoha, so I answered sincerely, but it’s gotten worse and worse.”
“Who?”
“Benjamin Simmons. You know, the guy who was on TV a few years ago. The one who got his doctorate at the youngest age.”
The three people’s eyes widened.
““Ah!””
If there was Yu Seoha in the East, there was Benjamin Simmons in the West. There had once been people who said that.
He had entered regular school the year he turned four. He graduated high school at eight, earned a bachelor’s in mathematics at eleven, then charged ahead and completed a master’s in just one more year.
And at the age of only fifteen, he received a doctorate in quantum physics from the University of Giessen in Germany.
It was the first such case since the twentieth century, when university curricula had become systematized. After that, there had been no particularly well-known news about him, or so they thought...
Slide.
Dokyeong took out his phone and opened his mailbox.
As he scrolled down, the screen was packed with emails bearing English subject lines.
[Subject: About Seoha Yu]
[Subject: Request for introduction]
“Wow! Isn’t this basically stalking?”
Jihoon let out a hollow laugh.
“The contents are even worse. He started asking more and more personal questions, and when he asked me to introduce him to Seoha, I blocked him right there.”
“Seoha really is a star. Enough for someone that famous to latch on.”
Jiye rubbed her arms as if she had goosebumps.
All at once, she remembered Shin Uhyun’s video clip with five million views, the one where he said genius was not determined by age.
‘That’s true. Even if Seoha were thirty or forty right now, he’d still be more than enough of a monster.’
For a moment, curiosity arose as to what kind of person he might be, but she soon shook her head and brushed the thought away.
She had far too many overdue assignments to indulge in idle thoughts.
***
.
A quiet café near MIT in Cambridge.
Tak tak tak.
Theo silently tapped away at his laptop keyboard, then pressed his temple and let out a long sigh.
“These little bastards, I swear.”
Team Apex was indisputably a lab standing at the forefront of the global mathematical world, but when one looked inside, its operations were astonishingly chaotic.
Offers were pouring in from everywhere. Processing massive amounts of practical data, a budget so large it was hard to believe it had been assigned to a single lab, and even the legal and administrative procedures necessary for running the lab.
Before the mountain of paperwork, Seoha, Sujeong, and Cecilia all averted their eyes at the same time as if they had made a promise.
“I-I don’t know anything about this stuff! My butler handles it all for me!”
“I can’t even manage my allowance, so my mom scolds me every day.”
“......”
Perhaps thinking nothing at all, Seoha, rarely enough, had his mouth hanging open with a vacant expression.
Sree was busy maintaining the servers and workstations. In the end, all the cleanup fell to him, the adult.
“What are they going to do if I embezzle funds?”
The trouble had started because he could not bear to leave such a sloppy system alone. By the time he came to his senses, everyone was relying on him like a mother. He felt he could bet his entire fortune that Seoha did not even know the first digit of the lab’s operating balance.
“Excuse me!”
Theo lifted his head.
Early twenties?
His face looked young, but the air his body gave off was by no means light. The blue eyes hidden beneath his blond hair seemed to speak of his intellect.
Only then did Theo remember that he had scheduled an interview here.
Rustle.
He rummaged through the documents and found the printed résumé.
“Benjamin Simmons. Welcome.”
Ben’s expression soured at the way Theo read his name from the paper.
Theo’s eyes skimmed over his credentials.
A master’s in mathematics, a doctorate in physics, and fourth place in the Rojia rankings.
It would not be bad to have one mathematician on the team who was well-versed in physics. That was why he had scheduled the interview.
“I didn’t think you would call me out to a café. I’m fairly sure Seoha said anyone up to fourth place in Rojia could enter the lab.”
Theo’s eyes twitched.
After Cecilia joined, Rojia was practically an empty house. Even if he was fourth there, it was hardly an achievement worth bragging about.
“And Seoha didn’t even come himself. Are you aware that I hold the title of youngest Ph.D.?”
Theo could not hold back and chuckled.
“Ah! I’d forgotten for a moment. Brats are usually like this, aren’t they?”
If Seoha had been terribly unlucky, would he have grown up like this?
From the moment he was born, peers had never existed for Benjamin. He had always been treated as a freak, receiving rude stares wherever he went.
To Ben, Seoha was the first “person of his own kind” he had come to know. But what he saw at the place he had come to with such expectations was an adult sighing while counting a pile of receipts. Naturally, his words did not come out politely.
“What exactly is that supposed to mean, mister?”
‘Mister?’
Theo could read Benjamin’s thoughts.
In academia, those with doctorates were usually addressed dutifully as “Dr.” or “Professor.”
To them, anyone without a doctorate was categorized as “Mr.”
Of course, this was his roundabout way of saying that even someone with a master’s was academically nothing more than a layman.
“Seoha is busy, Doctor. You want to join our lab, don’t you? Then you’ll have to interview with me.”
He had already been stressed from miscellaneous chores as it was.
Theo bared his teeth in a bright smile.